Sometimes people send you links to websites in the Messages app, and while most are legitimate, you might also end up with spammers sending you malicious links.

You can never be too careful with a jailbroken iPhone, and a new free jailbreak tweak called SMSNoLinkOpen by iOS developer CydiaGeek prevents you from launching links via the Messages app with just a tap.

At first thought, it probably sounds like a hindrance to link-opening, but the tweak doesn’t completely stop you from visiting a website someone sends to you.

Instead, it just prevents you from launching the link directly through the Messages app with a tap and being redirected to a potentially-malicious source, which helps protect against inadvertent taps or negligence.

You can still copy and paste the link into Safari manually, which gives you a moment to review the URL before you load the website. From a security perspective, this is much better than having an automatic redirect from the time you tap on the link.

To double-check the URL and to copy/paste it, you can tap and hold on the link on non-3D Touch devices, or use a 3D Touch gesture on capable devices to get the following peek-and-pop menu:

Here, you can view the URL and copy it so you can paste it manually inside of Safari. If you see a URL you don’t trust, it’s just as easy to back out of the menu without loading the website.

SMSNoLinkOpen doesn’t come with any options to configure, so it takes effect immediately after installation. If you care about your security, then you might want to give the tweak a try.

SMSNoLinkOpen can be downloaded for free from Cydia’s BigBoss repository. The tweak works on all jailbroken iOS 8, 9, and 10 devices.

Do you think SMSNoLinkOpen is a good idea for security? Share why or why not in the comments section below.